Tuesday, 6 September 2011

The Brad effect: film-makers and stars flock to Scotland

CREATIVE Scotland, the national arts agency, says a raft of new blockbusters are set to be filmed in the country in the wake of the recent shooting of the Brad Pitt blockbuster World War Z in Glasgow.

Filming for the latest film in the Batman series has also taken place in the Highlands, while the arrival in Scotland of the cast and crew of two new movies starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, right, Susan Sarandon and Scarlett Johansson, is imminent.
As Hanks, Sarandon and Berry prepare to film Cloud Atlas – an adaptation of the acclaimed David Mitchell novel – and Johansson gets ready to shoot Under The Skin, Belle Doyle, Creative Scotland’s location department manager, said demand by film-makers to come to the country was frenetic.
“We are kind of suffering from a lack of space at the moment because we are so busy. We’ve benefited this year especially because the pound is low against a number of other currencies,” she said.
And Doyle said there were more Hollywood productions in the pipeline for Scotland.

We are suffering from a lack of space at the moment because we are so busy

“There will be more coming in,” she said, adding, “I’m more interested in trying to get more Scottish, indigenous production, though. It’s all very well having big Hollywood productions, but if we’re being serious about it we need people to be writing and directing stuff, producing stuff.”
Cloud Atlas will be shooting scenes in Glasgow, Edinburgh and other undisclosed Scottish locations later this month. The film, like the novel, follows six storylines, ranging from scenes set in the South Pacific in the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic world.
Johansson is also due to arrive in Scotland in mid- October to shoot scenes in the Highlands for Under The Skin, in which she plays an alien who seduces men and then murders them for their body parts. The film is adapted from the debut novel by Highlands-based author, Michel Faber.
The producers of Cloud Atlas were attracted to filming in Glasgow and Edinburgh because the architecture of the cities offered the period features they wanted. A dingy back alley off Leith Street in Edinburgh is said to be among the locations they will be shooting in, but Doyle said the impact of the shoot will be far more discreet than World War Z, which occupied several streets around Glasgow’s city chambers and the Merchant City area.
“World War Z was here for a certain number of days, and it was so big that it couldn’t be ignored,” said Doyle.
Cloud Atlas will be much smaller and tighter. It will be like everything else that’s filmed in the city – most of the time people might notice a unit sign or trucks parked up, but it shouldn’t really affect someone in the way that something the size of World War Z has.”